ORIGINAL POST:As I'm sure you retrogamers have likely heard today, Nintendo has announced that they are releasing the NES Classic Edition this November. Like the Flashback consoles - you've seen them, there's a few Atari versions, Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Sega Genesis - it's a simple "plug-and-play" concept, compatible with current TVs and with a number of built-in classic games.

From what I remember, the ColecoVision one has a really weird selection - and the Genesis one, half of them aren't even classic Genesis games, they're like browser Flash games or something. This NES one, however, has a fairly solid and representative selection of 30 games. Unlike the Genesis one there isn't a slot for your own dusty cartridges, so you're stuck with these 30, but hey, they certainly could have done a lot worse. I scratch my head at a few - it's a good thing I still have my original Contra cartridge and a (usually) working NES, because I wonder why Super C made the cut but the original Contra didn't. Also, while Pac-Man and Galaga are decent arcade ports, I would have preferred something more exclusive to the NES.

But, anyway, since we've had some success with my themed/bundled requests, like when we recreated the best book of all time, the NES Game Atlas, and its imagined Game Boy and Super NES follow-ups (though at the time of this writing, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on the GBC is not done, but it's the only one), as well as the one about Nintendo Power (a few missing ones there still), I figured, why not have another big request? VGMaps.com should be ready for the release of this cute mini NES. Most have been mapped already anyway, and for the ones that aren't, or incomplete, consider this a request.

What I was thinking, besides a shot of the empty "jar" or whatever that is in Dr. Mario, is maybe to take a screenshot of each Level. If I recall correctly, there are 20 selectable Levels, and though it goes beyond 20, I'm not sure that there are more viruses after that point. The placement of viruses is probably random, but you could explain somewhere on there that these are just possible random arrangements and just serves to give an idea of how much stuff you have to deal with. Also similarly, in Tetris (the Nintendo version, as opposed to the Tengen version, is listed on the Nintendo Power topic), doesn't the background change colour at certain points? You could also take a screen capture of the multiplayer screen in Dr. Mario (again, with the different Levels), and though this isn't really a resource for sprites, I think in both Dr. Mario and Tetris it wouldn't hurt, if you just wanted to fill space, to show all possible pieces in all rotations. Just some ideas so we can go beyond a mere screenshot.

I will have Dr. Mario ready in another day or two. The level goes up to 24, but the only thing that happens if you beat 24 is you play it over and over again. Game speed changes the background color and determines which cutscenes you get every 5 levels. I can screenshot all 24 levels at each of these speeds but they will look about the same except for background color.

There are actually only four left...-Can anyone confirm if there are only twelve Phases in Balloon Fight? Is the "Balloon Trip" mode mappable?-zagato says he's almost done with Dr. Mario...-Not sure how Galaga could be done, but there must be a way.-Now that I look at it, Will, you had done about half of Kirby's Adventure way back in 2008. What about the rest of it? Are there technical issues?

Well I wouldn't call the issues completely technical, but I moved to Windows 7 a while ago. I am having trouble with trying to retain the true colours of the screenshots I take. Whenever colours from a 256 colour bmp are copied and pasted, they change. The only way to retain the colours is for the file to be saved as a 24 bit bmp. This process is very tedious. It would be better if I had an NES emulator that saved screenshots as PNGs. If you have an idea of how I can get around this problem, let me know.

VirtuaNES can take screenshots in PNG in you go Option - Emulator - and check the box that says "Picture of a snapshot is taken by PNG" It also has a built in map viewer, memory viewer, and tile viewer.

Also i made codes for Kirby's Adventure a while back to change which ability you have. Should come in handy for exploration.

Thanks for Dr. Mario, zagato! I was surprised at the sprite rips you have there on the right. What are those animals and witch doing there?

And Will, it sounds like you might have a situation where you have a 256-colour limit, in which case you should just be able to increase the colour depth. "Increase Color Depth" is what it is called in Paint Shop Pro, which is what I usually use. Even if you are saving in a truecolor BMP or PNG, I'm not sure why it should be tedious...isn't it just a matter of just saving? Anyway, it sounds like we can thank zagato again for his helpful suggestion...as well as his codes!

I was surprised at the sprite rips you have there on the right. What are those animals and witch doing there?

Those are things that show up during cutscenes when you beat levels 5, 10, 15, and 20 on medium or high speed. They fly around the screen where the 3 viruses are sitting on that tree. It's interesting to note the seal and that soccer ball looking thing, as well as some of the explosion effects are unusued graphics. I ripped them directly out of the memory using the tile viewer.

I've been doing some hacking and I have reason to believe your Balloon Fight maps that were submitted by Wario Bros. are complete. This seems to be one of those early NES games where the levels keep repeating until the hex value reaches FF and it resets to the first stage. I went past phase 12 and it just kept reusing the maps you already have... except for maybe Bonus-4, which i'll post here.

003B selects the stage out of the ROM. There are only 16 stages in the game, 12 normal and 4 bonus, so this resets to 0 after you clear 0F or Bonus-4. Manually setting this to 10 results in a scrambled screen.

003C is where the game keeps track of your phase number. FF is phase P5, but the game is still choosing out of only 16 phases.

As for the Balloon Trip, 009A is the vertical position address and setting it to 00 floats you up in the menu away from anything that can harm you, so you don't even have to do anything to survive. From what i've heard this map goes on forever. I watched on fast forward until I was down to rank-1 and everything on the screen looked like it was randomly placed so I don't think this can really be mapped.

In Balloon Trip, are each of the individual elements placed randomly, or are there predetermined screens (or parts of screens, or multiple lengths of screens) that are random?

Just to figure that out, I don't know if that might take more hacking than it's worth, but if it is the latter, then it would be mappable. If the former, yeah, I guess that would be tricky. I forget, are there checkpoints or landmarks? If so, you could probably map out a couple lengths and then, like the Dr. Mario ones, put a statement saying that this is just a random Balloon Trip. If there is no natural stop point, then maybe not. Also kind of interesting that you fly to the left, but then when the map is loaded up on VGMaps.com you would initially be seeing wherever you stopped mapping, instead of the start point. It's certainly a unique scenario.

Balloon Fight's last Bonus is up, and if Balloon Trip mode can be figured out, great, but if not, the game can be considered complete as it is. Thanks, zagato!

Galaga is done too, thanks again, zagato! I don't get why the box has a subtitle of "Demons Of Death"; I assume that refers to the bug alien things but they don't seem that demonic. Amusingly, the next game we have alphabetically on the NES is Gargoyle's Quest II: The Demon Darkness, which also has a "three-word, two of those beginning with D, one of them being "Demon(s)"" subtitle.

Sent in a map of Balloon Trip. As far as I can tell, the first two or three screens, the ones with sparks that are stationary and don't move, are always the same. After that point, when the sparks are moving, all the balloons and sparks are laid down at random.

It's not uncommon to see the same pattern come up again when you reset the game though. As Jon said, I think the game is randomly choosing "parts of screens" while generating the map. I'm not exactly sure how this works but a 4096 pixel map should give a pretty good impression of what this mode looks like.

Also, this would take days without cheating, but if you get the max score and then overflow your points back to 0 your rank drops from 1 all the way back down to 47.

VGMaps.com is an archive of video game maps up since May 6, 2002. Optimized for at least 800 x 600 resolution.

This site does not contain commercial ROMs or any other illegal materials. All directly "ripped" game images are the property of their respective copyright holders. This web site and compass logo are copyrighted by Jonathan Leung 2002-2018.